The Entangled Society

Pieter Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (1567), or the land, according to Byung-Chul Han, of “overstuffed” positivity–“an inferno of the same” (Agony of Eros [2017], 6).

I. Sows in a Crate

The dramatic conclusion of Byung-Chul Han’s gloriously terse The Burnout Society (2015) calls forth–for me–an image of a sow in a gestation crate.

The sow may be genetically engineered to produce upwards of 20 piglets a year. According to Big Pork, the gestation crate is necessary for the sow’s health. In her crate, she lives a healthy life, but a life without what Han describes as “livingness.” The sow lives a life–but not “the good life” (50, emphasis original)

The life of the industrial sow is a vestige of an earlier form of human society. Her health is required–and it is enforced/policed by the Master, by Big Pork. When age or disease makes health impossible–the sow is killed. She becomes what she can no longer (re)produce: pork.

Unlike the industrial sow, living as she does in a disciplinary society, Han argues that we live in an achievement society. In our case, we have returned to the wild, and the internalized imperative of absolute survival is our Master.

The distinguishing feature of the achievement society is self-regulation. Gone are the days of an external Master ruling over their sows. Nowadays, we enter the crate of (re)production of our own “free” will.

Our eagerness to (re)produce breeds burnout because closure or an end to (re)production is not forthcoming in our survival society. Ultimately, our inability to live up to our ideal–to endlessly live/produce–stuns us.

II. Humans in a Crate

The achievement society is a “capitalist economy [that] absolutizes survival” (50). The survival society is, according to Han, an active, multi-tasking society:

Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. . . In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. . . . The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produces a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal . . . . Concern for the good life, which includes life as a member of the community, is yielding more and more to the simple concern for survival (12-13).

As driven animals, we do not require external motivation to (re)produce. “That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow” (46).

According to Han, I am “predator and prey at once.” I “exploit” myself (10, 19). I am unable to be unproductive.

Yet, we are not aware that we have walked into and are living entirely within the gestation crate. The achievement-subject “thinks itself free of all foreign constraint” but is “entangled in destructive self-constraints” (47).

III. Stunned

What our entanglement in the crate of our freedom achieves is burnout and depression. “Burnout . . . often precedes depression” (44).

Burnout is the fatigue experienced by the “entrepreneur of the self” (Agony of Eros, 9). It is the result of “voluntary self-exploitation,” of being a “flexible person,” of constantly changing to meet the current demands of the market (Burnout, 44, emphasis original).

The real ego strives to keep up with the demand, the ever-new market, now projected as the ego ideal. The problem is that closure/gratification is not forthcoming—one never arrives at their desired destination.

Thus, I turn on myself. “In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach” (47).

Depression is the deepening of fatigue/burnout. “The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down . . . it locks its jaws on itself . . . this leads the self to hallow and empty out” (42).

The depressive subject is characterless, formless, chaotic. The depressive lacks the strength to rebrand. It is stuned.

IV. Blood Bath

Han offers a promising antidote to the (re)production of the achievement society: the tired society. We may appreciate his constructive proposal more if we address an aspect of his analysis that I think is incorrect, in addition to some reservations I have with it.

My reservations are as follows:

First reservation: Is the split between an older disciplinary society and the contemporary achievement society (even more regressive than the previous disciplinary society) as clear and radical as Han seems to think it is?

The success of Donald Trump in the U.S. indicates that the distinction between the two societies is not so clear. Trump masterfully deployed the immunological imaginary of the disciplinary society, casting the Other as a contagion–a dire threat to the pure blood of the social body. Trump’s strategy would not have worked if the idea of otherness had been weak or powerless, as it is in Han’s achievement society.

It does seem like the old disciplinary logic is lurking in the background. Perhaps repressed, it erupts into view every so often.

Second reservation: It is also hard not to notice in Han’s writing what I call a mystical flair. In Agony of Eros, Han asserts that “[e]ros conquers depression” (4). The Other is salvation from what Han calls absolute positivity or “the inferno of the same.”

But at what cost? The self.

In his Forward to The Agony of Eros, Alain Badiou reminds us that the “vanishing of the self in the Other–has a long and glorious history: the mystical love of God . . . ” (xi). While Badiou cites Saint John of the Cross as an example, there are others, like Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete.

From them we learn that self-evacuation/immobilization tends to lead in one of two directions: either to 1) the reification of the self–i.e., to auto-eroticism–(e.g., Mechthild); or to 2) the evacuation of the self (e.g., Angela, Porete). The outcome is not guaranteed.

Moreover, the difference between them is not clear. The inferno of the same melts identity down, leaving it to suffocate in its blood, while the freeze(?) of the Other immobilizes the self, incapacitating it.

The idea seems to be that immanence/same without transcendence/Other is a kind of hell (or a deadly illusion) and transcendence/Other without immanence/same is a kind of heaven (i.e., the real). Ok, but if the same/self/Own is irrelevant in either case, why are the respective “destinations” evaluated differently?

Third reservation: Han does not consider animal development in his philosophy. Animal development is not a novel philosophical topic. For example, Rousseau observes that the infant begins in monarchy (i.e., the same).

Her Majesty then enters into a relationship with the maternal parent(s) (i.e., Other[s]). Only then, if she is lucky, does she begin to leave the family sphere and enter society–hopefully as a citizen committed to love and reciprocity.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum carefully considers human development in her work (see, e.g., Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice [2013] and The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis [2018]). One benefit of such an approach is a more supple history and theory of the relationship between the same and the Other.

For example, Nussbaum consistently points out the ongoing threat of monarchy, or what Han describes as “the inferno of the same.” However, what Han considers a return to animality, Nussbaum recognizes as an aspect of human animal development.

So much for my reservations. What do I think Han gets wrong? I think he is wrong about the status of psychoanalysis in the supposed era of the absolute achievement society.

V. In the Beginning: the Unconscious

In Burnout, Han asserts that “Freudian psychoanalysis is only possible in repressive societies that found their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commandments.” Han claims that the “late-modern achievement subject possesses an entirely different psyche than the obedience-subject for whom Freud conceived psychoanalysis” (36, emphasis original).

“The Freudian unconscious,” Han recognizes, “is not a formation that exists outside of time.” The unconscious is also not, pace Han, “a product of a disciplinary society . . . that we have long left behind” (36). The formation of the unconscious does not depend on society.

Jean Laplanche, for example, argues that the unconscious is formed by “enigmatic signifiers,” messages from adults (what I am calling the maternal caregiver[s]/Other[s]) that are untranslatable by the infant/child. Consequently, these messages are repressed–forming “a certain type of reality, called the unconscious” (“A Short Treatise on the Unconscious”, 92).

Han may respond that Freud ultimately rejected the seduction theory that Leplanche revives, giving primacy to the Other in the formation of the unconscious. Yes, Freud argues that the unconscious is formed in response to the instincts. In so doing, Freud makes otherness an intractable, internal feature of the human being (i.e., the biological organism, the human body, or the same).

Society, of whatever kind, need not play a (primary) role in the formation of the unconscious. The unconscious originates as a result of trauma, specifically the shock of human existence, starting at birth.

VI. Entangling/Entangled Desire

The formation of the unconscious does not depend on social organization–and this detail is significant because without the unconscious, there can be neither an achievement society nor a viable source of resistance to it.

The unconscious is the source of desire, and Han’s achievement society, it seems to me, is driven–not by instinct–but by desire. Desire is inherently unentangled. As such, it drags the subject of desire in various directions. In this way, meaning is (re)produced.

Desire flits from this to that, like a hummingbird, (re)producing meaning out of originally disentangled, unconscious materials. Desire perpetually entangles–that is, it (re)forms the unentangled chaos of the unconscious.

The unconscious is also an occasion, at least within a Lacanian framework, for the entanglement of desire. This is an important observation because Han’s achievement society is, it seems to me, both frenetically active and frozen in place.

In the achievement society, the hummingbird flits about in a cage. The cage is the death drive.

The drive captures desire, entangling it in a cycle of repetition. Now, the hummingbird returns to the same flower again and again. In this way, the drive tires desire.

Tiring desire, the drive, the cage in which desire is captured, potentially frees it from the confines of the crate in which it is unknowingly circulating. Slowed, desire is potentially forced to see the crate/the thing in which it has unknowingly constrained itself.

Han’s achievement society is entirely diagnosable, if you will, from within a psychoanalytic framework–and in a sense that is entirely consistent with Han’s argument. The unconscious is a powerful resource for rethinking–and even for refocusing–political desire.

VII. The Entangled Society

In my view, the Other is the figure of the death drive in Han’s Burnout Society. The Other entangles or tires (as opposed to exhausts) the same–potentially opening it up to a new relationship with the world, women, and men.

Han, commenting on Peter Handke’s work, “Essay on Tiredness,” locates a form of tiredness that opens up “a space of friendliness-as-indifference, where ‘no one and nothing dominates or commands'” (31). Han observes that “[s]uch ‘fundamental tiredness’ brings together all the forms of existence and coexistence that vanish in the course of absolutized activity” (32).

Handke’s “we-tiredness”–a tired with you, as opposed to “I-tiredness,” a tired of you–opens up a potentially playful space between Others (33, 34). Han defines the space between as the Sabbath.

Han notes that Sabbath “originally meant stopping” (33, emphasis original). It is a day to stop commanding and being commanded. Duty and/or desire rest. This is the single day God calls holy. “It is a day of tiredness,” Han writes, “a time of, and for, play” (34).

The religion of the entangled society is “an immanent religion of [fundamental] tiredness” (34, emphasis original). It is a society in the grip of a playful drive, one inspiring new connections, curiosity, and openness without yielding to the pressure to achieve anything.

The entangled society is not the society of no! or yes we can!–it is the society of see what happens when you (are) stop(ped) and you play.

In my view, Han comes very close to theorizing a society that recombines duty and desire, reality and pleasure principles. Isn’t that what play enables, relationships with Others that are also pleasing–and even potentially new? But at the last moment, Han dances away, escaping “the achievement-principle entirely” (24).